in two, opening a hole that was better than a hundred feet across.
The outlaws and their allies stiffened expectantly, frowns creas-
ing their faces as the forest continued to shake with the approach
of whatever was hidden there.
Shades, Morgan whispered to himself.
The thing emerged from out of the fading shadows. It was
huge, a creature of impossible size, an apparition comprised of
the worst bits and pieces of things scavengers might have left. It
was formed of hair and sinew and bone, but at the same time of
metal plates and bars. There were jagged ends and shiny sur-
faces, iron grafted onto flesh, flesh grown into iron. It had the
look of a monstrous, misshapen crustacean or worm, but was
neither. It shambled forward, its glittering eyes rolling upward
to find the edge of the bluff. Pinchers clicked like knives and
claws scraped heedlessly the roughened stone.
For an instant, Morgan thought it was a machine. Then, a
heartbeat later, he realized it was alive.
“Demon’s blood!” Steff cried in recognition, his gruff voice
angry and frightened. “They’ve brought a Creeper!”
Hunching its way slowly through the ranks of the Federation
army, the Creeper came for them.
XXVI
Morgan Lean remembered the stories then.
It seemed as if there had always been stories of
the Creepers, tales that had been handed down from
grandfather to father, from father to son, from generation to
generation. They were told in the Highlands and in most parts
of the Southland he had visited. Men whispered of the Creepers
over glasses of ale around late night fires and sent shivers of
excitement and horror down the spines of boys like Morgan,
who listened at the circle’s edge. No one put much stock in the
stories, though; after all, they were told in the same breath as
those wild imaginings of Skull Bearers and Mord Wraiths and
other monsters out of a time that was all but forgotten. Yet no
one was quite ready to dismiss them out-of-hand, either. Be-
cause whatever the men of the Southland might believe, there
were Dwarves in the Eastland who swore by them.
Steff was one of those Dwarves. He had repeated the stories
to Morgan-long after Morgan had already heard them-not as
legend but as truth. They had happened, he insisted. They were
real.
It was the Federation, he told Morgan, who made the Creep-
ers. A hundred years ago, when the war against the Dwarves
had bogged down deep in the wilderness of the Anar, when the
armies of the Southland were thwarted by the jungle and the
mountains and by the tangle of brush and the walls of rock that
prevented them from engaging and trapping their elusive quarry,
the Federation had called the Creepers to life. The Dwarves had
taken the offensive away from the Federation by then, a sizeable
resistance force that was determined to avoid capture and to
harass the invaders until they were driven from their homeland.
From their fortress lairs within the maze of canyons and defiles
of the Ravenshom and the cavelike hollows of the surrounding
forests, the Dwarves counterattacked the heavier and more cum-
bersome Federation armies almost at will and slipped away with
the ease of night’s shadows. The months dragged on as me Fed-
eration effort stalled, and it was then that the Creepers appeared.
No one knew for certain where they came from. There were
some who claimed they were simply machines constructed by
the Federation builders, juggernauts without capacity to think,
whose only function was to bring down the Dwarf fortifications
and the Dwarves with them. There were others who said that
no machine could have done what the Creepers did, that such
things possessed cunning and instinct. A few whispered that
they were formed of magic. Whatever their origin, the Creepers
materialized within the wilderness of the central Anar and began
to hunt. They were unstoppable. They tracked the Dwarves re-
lentlessly and, when they caught up to them, destroyed them
all. The war ended in a little more than a month, the Dwarf
armies annihilated, the backbone of the resistance shattered.
After that, the Creepers vanished as mysteriously as they had